Nuclear battery

[Piotr Wyderski]

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
<peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

Buy a lithium battery! They last a lot longer than the half-life of
tritium. Lots more power too.

We do use tritium lights so's to not bash our heads on the old bed
frame at night.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s3kc839d485d0gc/Tritium.jpg?raw=1

After about 8 years, they are getting dim. Time to buy some fresh
ones.


There is another type of atomic battery, namely the direct collection
of betas in a vacuum. It makes small currents at hundreds of
kilovolts, which can be hard to use efficiently.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 15/08/2019 21:03, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

Buy a lithium battery! They last a lot longer than the half-life of
tritium. Lots more power too.

We do use tritium lights so's to not bash our heads on the old bed
frame at night.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s3kc839d485d0gc/Tritium.jpg?raw=1

After about 8 years, they are getting dim. Time to buy some fresh
ones.

I prefer the plastic filled with doped strontium aluminate - just needs
to be in the sun for a few hours to work all night. 3M had an emergency
torch that used it to great effect just before power LEDs became common.

There is another type of atomic battery, namely the direct collection
of betas in a vacuum. It makes small currents at hundreds of
kilovolts, which can be hard to use efficiently.

My favourite is a zamboni pile taken from war surplus night vision
devices. Looks like 3 black sticks of dynamite in a perspex frame.
Produces insane voltage at essentially zero current - just about enough
to electrostatically attract a long piece of foil again and again.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 21:31:23 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 15/08/2019 21:03, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

Buy a lithium battery! They last a lot longer than the half-life of
tritium. Lots more power too.

We do use tritium lights so's to not bash our heads on the old bed
frame at night.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s3kc839d485d0gc/Tritium.jpg?raw=1

After about 8 years, they are getting dim. Time to buy some fresh
ones.

I prefer the plastic filled with doped strontium aluminate - just needs
to be in the sun for a few hours to work all night. 3M had an emergency
torch that used it to great effect just before power LEDs became common.

I tried that, but there's not enough daylight in that bedroom to
charge the strontium aluminate. Strontium aluminate is amazing stuff.

A lithium battery and an LED would last 30 years or so, but would
involve more carpentry. And the nuke thing is cool.

There is another type of atomic battery, namely the direct collection
of betas in a vacuum. It makes small currents at hundreds of
kilovolts, which can be hard to use efficiently.

My favourite is a zamboni pile taken from war surplus night vision
devices. Looks like 3 black sticks of dynamite in a perspex frame.
Produces insane voltage at essentially zero current - just about enough
to electrostatically attract a long piece of foil again and again.

One WWII-era sniperscope had a wristwatch mechanism that closed a
contact briefly, about once a second. That fed a battery to a step-up
transformer which drove a cold-cathode rectifier to charge the image
converter tube.

Some cheap Russian night vision things have a battery and a pushbutton
and a transformer and a rectifier. You are the inverter oscillator.

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200) it happened Piotr Wyderski
<peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote in <qj448q$1fiv$1@gioia.aioe.org>:

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

Yes,
I have 2 photo diodes looking at a tritium tube:
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/tri_pic/

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2019 13:03:29 -0700) it happened John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
<v7eble9agsff8pkjtih1n8jltecr26vo71@4ax.com>:

On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

Buy a lithium battery! They last a lot longer than the half-life of
tritium. Lots more power too.

We do use tritium lights so's to not bash our heads on the old bed
frame at night.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s3kc839d485d0gc/Tritium.jpg?raw=1

After about 8 years, they are getting dim. Time to buy some fresh
ones.


There is another type of atomic battery, namely the direct collection
of betas in a vacuum. It makes small currents at hundreds of
kilovolts, which can be hard to use efficiently.

I have an 80W solar panel looking at the nuclear processes in the sun.

 

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:07:22 GMT, Jan Panteltje
<pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200) it happened Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote in <qj448q$1fiv$1@gioia.aioe.org>:

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

Yes,
I have 2 photo diodes looking at a tritium tube:
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/tri_pic/

Do you think there might be phosphor degradation over time?

I wonder what the time spectrum/waveform of the light looks like. I'd
expect single-decay events to make detectable spikes into a good
detector. Old clock dials, radium alphas hitting phosphors, sure did.
They would make nice fat pulses into a PMT.

 

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:08:49 GMT, Jan Panteltje
<pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2019 13:03:29 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
v7eble9agsff8pkjtih1n8jltecr26vo71@4ax.com>:

On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

Buy a lithium battery! They last a lot longer than the half-life of
tritium. Lots more power too.

We do use tritium lights so's to not bash our heads on the old bed
frame at night.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s3kc839d485d0gc/Tritium.jpg?raw=1

After about 8 years, they are getting dim. Time to buy some fresh
ones.


There is another type of atomic battery, namely the direct collection
of betas in a vacuum. It makes small currents at hundreds of
kilovolts, which can be hard to use efficiently.

I have an 80W solar panel looking at the nuclear processes in the sun.

That will get dim in a mere 12 hours.

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:04:17 -0700) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
<drgdletds7if19tpncb3h4o6vsuokofjk0@4ax.com>:

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:07:22 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200) it happened Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote in <qj448q$1fiv$1@gioia.aioe.org>:

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

Yes,
I have 2 photo diodes looking at a tritium tube:
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/tri_pic/

Do you think there might be phosphor degradation over time?

Oh absolutely.

But since we are looking at seasonal changes a simple Fourier transform on the years of data would
see that as a very very low frequency.
It would not interfere with the experiment.

I wonder what the time spectrum/waveform of the light looks like. I'd
expect single-decay events to make detectable spikes into a good
detector. Old clock dials, radium alphas hitting phosphors, sure did.
They would make nice fat pulses into a PMT.

I think I did not test it with the tritium tubes, the glass stops most I'd think.
I still have some radium painted watch hands.
I may also still have some radium light switch that glows in the dark...
And a phosphor screen.



This is a movie I made, just a few seconds long, only 300 kB, that shows the single events:
http://panteltje.com/pub/tritium_light_movie_mvi_3243.avi

In Linux to get it you can use
wget http://panteltje.com/pub/tritium_light_movie_mvi_3243.avi



>

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Aug 2019 07:53:03 -0700) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
<8pgdlet7o7o2rhlqt86jde7hb24jrnj4t6@4ax.com>:

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:08:49 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2019 13:03:29 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
v7eble9agsff8pkjtih1n8jltecr26vo71@4ax.com>:

On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

Buy a lithium battery! They last a lot longer than the half-life of
tritium. Lots more power too.

We do use tritium lights so's to not bash our heads on the old bed
frame at night.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s3kc839d485d0gc/Tritium.jpg?raw=1

After about 8 years, they are getting dim. Time to buy some fresh
ones.


There is another type of atomic battery, namely the direct collection
of betas in a vacuum. It makes small currents at hundreds of
kilovolts, which can be hard to use efficiently.

I have an 80W solar panel looking at the nuclear processes in the sun.

That will get dim in a mere 12 hours.

Nothing to worry about, just earth shadow,
sun will be still there when morning comes
Buffer in a battery.

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 16:35:51 GMT, Jan Panteltje
<pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Aug 2019 07:53:03 -0700) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
8pgdlet7o7o2rhlqt86jde7hb24jrnj4t6@4ax.com>:

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:08:49 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2019 13:03:29 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
v7eble9agsff8pkjtih1n8jltecr26vo71@4ax.com>:

On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

Buy a lithium battery! They last a lot longer than the half-life of
tritium. Lots more power too.

We do use tritium lights so's to not bash our heads on the old bed
frame at night.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s3kc839d485d0gc/Tritium.jpg?raw=1

After about 8 years, they are getting dim. Time to buy some fresh
ones.


There is another type of atomic battery, namely the direct collection
of betas in a vacuum. It makes small currents at hundreds of
kilovolts, which can be hard to use efficiently.

I have an 80W solar panel looking at the nuclear processes in the sun.

That will get dim in a mere 12 hours.

Nothing to worry about, just earth shadow,
sun will be still there when morning comes
Buffer in a battery.

Easy for you to say. A few days worth of batteries for your house
would be a big deal. Especially if a week-long snowstorm arrives. I
guess you can always burn the chairs and the books.

Batteries at utility scale would be a gigantic industry. With
environmental consequences.

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 16:33:01 GMT, Jan Panteltje
<pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:04:17 -0700) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
drgdletds7if19tpncb3h4o6vsuokofjk0@4ax.com>:

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:07:22 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200) it happened Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote in <qj448q$1fiv$1@gioia.aioe.org>:

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

Yes,
I have 2 photo diodes looking at a tritium tube:
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/tri_pic/

Do you think there might be phosphor degradation over time?

Oh absolutely.

But since we are looking at seasonal changes a simple Fourier transform on the years of data would
see that as a very very low frequency.
It would not interfere with the experiment.

I wonder what the time spectrum/waveform of the light looks like. I'd
expect single-decay events to make detectable spikes into a good
detector. Old clock dials, radium alphas hitting phosphors, sure did.
They would make nice fat pulses into a PMT.

I think I did not test it with the tritium tubes, the glass stops most I'd think.

The visible-light flashes should be resolvable, I'm thinking. The rate
will be high, so a PMT would be ideal to see them. Some phosphors have
nanosecond decays so the pulses will be short. Might be fun. You could
maybe count the pulses as a way to measure your decay rate.


>I still have some radium painted watch hands.

You can see individual alphas firing in an old radium-dial clock, once
you are dark adapted. Looks cool. Makes big signals into a nearby PMT.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 16/08/2019 21:25, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 16:35:51 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

Nothing to worry about, just earth shadow,
sun will be still there when morning comes
Buffer in a battery.

Easy for you to say. A few days worth of batteries for your house
would be a big deal. Especially if a week-long snowstorm arrives. I
guess you can always burn the chairs and the books.

Or in the UK three months grey cloudy skies and the sun barely getting
15 degrees above the horizon even if the day happens to be sunny.

UK has active radar "Please go round the dangerous bend" signs where I
live - they work fine in midsummer but are dead in the water a couple of
hours after sunset in winter and destroy a set of batteries every year.
The ones with a wind turbine in addition fare a bit better.

Batteries at utility scale would be a gigantic industry. With
environmental consequences.

Although the recent UK National grid MFU demonstrates that it might well
make sense to have some battery storage in parallel with wind farms so
that their relatively expensive inverters can be used to support the
grid when the unexpected happens and generators go offline suddenly.

You can't ask the wind to blow harder or the sun to shine to order.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Sjouke Burry]

On 16.08.19 22:25, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 16:35:51 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Aug 2019 07:53:03 -0700) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
8pgdlet7o7o2rhlqt86jde7hb24jrnj4t6@4ax.com>:

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:08:49 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2019 13:03:29 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
v7eble9agsff8pkjtih1n8jltecr26vo71@4ax.com>:

On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

Buy a lithium battery! They last a lot longer than the half-life of
tritium. Lots more power too.

We do use tritium lights so's to not bash our heads on the old bed
frame at night.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s3kc839d485d0gc/Tritium.jpg?raw=1

After about 8 years, they are getting dim. Time to buy some fresh
ones.


There is another type of atomic battery, namely the direct collection
of betas in a vacuum. It makes small currents at hundreds of
kilovolts, which can be hard to use efficiently.

I have an 80W solar panel looking at the nuclear processes in the sun.

That will get dim in a mere 12 hours.

Nothing to worry about, just earth shadow,
sun will be still there when morning comes
Buffer in a battery.

Easy for you to say. A few days worth of batteries for your house
would be a big deal. Especially if a week-long snowstorm arrives. I
guess you can always burn the chairs and the books.

Batteries at utility scale would be a gigantic industry. With
environmental consequences.

A weeklong snowstorm will transfer megawatt-seconds to a few windmills.
That will tide him over the lack of sunlight.
Diversify.

 

[Rick C]

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 5:24:04 PM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:

On 16/08/2019 21:25, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 16:35:51 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

Nothing to worry about, just earth shadow,
sun will be still there when morning comes
Buffer in a battery.

Easy for you to say. A few days worth of batteries for your house
would be a big deal. Especially if a week-long snowstorm arrives. I
guess you can always burn the chairs and the books.

Or in the UK three months grey cloudy skies and the sun barely getting
15 degrees above the horizon even if the day happens to be sunny.

UK has active radar "Please go round the dangerous bend" signs where I
live - they work fine in midsummer but are dead in the water a couple of
hours after sunset in winter and destroy a set of batteries every year.
The ones with a wind turbine in addition fare a bit better.

Batteries at utility scale would be a gigantic industry. With
environmental consequences.

Although the recent UK National grid MFU demonstrates that it might well
make sense to have some battery storage in parallel with wind farms so
that their relatively expensive inverters can be used to support the
grid when the unexpected happens and generators go offline suddenly.

They still have not released enough information to say what was wrong. I saw in another group that the frequency drop (the trigger for most of the load shedding) happened some minutes before the gas plant went offline and that a couple minutes before the wind farm went offline. So it is not at all clear what was cause and what was effect.

I'll wait for the report on what failed before I start talking about solutions.

--

Rick C.

- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Sjouke Burry]

On 16.08.19 18:33, Jan Panteltje wrote:

wget http://panteltje.com/pub/tritium_light_movie_mvi_3243.avi
That also works in XP (and the other WIN OS-es i think).

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 6:26:07 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 16:35:51 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Aug 2019 07:53:03 -0700) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
8pgdlet7o7o2rhlqt86jde7hb24jrnj4t6@4ax.com>:

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:08:49 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2019 13:03:29 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
v7eble9agsff8pkjtih1n8jltecr26vo71@4ax.com>:

On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

Buy a lithium battery! They last a lot longer than the half-life of
tritium. Lots more power too.

We do use tritium lights so's to not bash our heads on the old bed
frame at night.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s3kc839d485d0gc/Tritium.jpg?raw=1

After about 8 years, they are getting dim. Time to buy some fresh
ones.


There is another type of atomic battery, namely the direct collection
of betas in a vacuum. It makes small currents at hundreds of
kilovolts, which can be hard to use efficiently.

I have an 80W solar panel looking at the nuclear processes in the sun.

That will get dim in a mere 12 hours.

Nothing to worry about, just earth shadow,
sun will be still there when morning comes
Buffer in a battery.

Easy for you to say. A few days worth of batteries for your house
would be a big deal. Especially if a week-long snowstorm arrives. I
guess you can always burn the chairs and the books.

Batteries at utility scale would be a gigantic industry. With
environmental consequences.

Vanadium flow batteries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery

might have environmental consequences - we might need new mines to supply the vanadium - but presumably that isn't what John Larkin had in mind (if it's possible to dignify the organ in question with the name "mind").

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Aug 2019 13:25:56 -0700) it happened John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
<o34ele5a55ek592joa1imo2um3s8sa9gpo@4ax.com>:

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 16:35:51 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Aug 2019 07:53:03 -0700) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
8pgdlet7o7o2rhlqt86jde7hb24jrnj4t6@4ax.com>:

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:08:49 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2019 13:03:29 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
v7eble9agsff8pkjtih1n8jltecr26vo71@4ax.com>:

On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:20:26 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Not terribly innovative on its own, but given the DIY aspect and price,
it can be a viable "eternal" auxiliary power supply for some hi-rel devices:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKdzhPiOqqg

The tritium pipes are available on Aliexpress for 10-20 dollars a piece.

Best regards, Piotr

Buy a lithium battery! They last a lot longer than the half-life of
tritium. Lots more power too.

We do use tritium lights so's to not bash our heads on the old bed
frame at night.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s3kc839d485d0gc/Tritium.jpg?raw=1

After about 8 years, they are getting dim. Time to buy some fresh
ones.


There is another type of atomic battery, namely the direct collection
of betas in a vacuum. It makes small currents at hundreds of
kilovolts, which can be hard to use efficiently.

I have an 80W solar panel looking at the nuclear processes in the sun.

That will get dim in a mere 12 hours.

Nothing to worry about, just earth shadow,
sun will be still there when morning comes
Buffer in a battery.

Easy for you to say. A few days worth of batteries for your house
would be a big deal. Especially if a week-long snowstorm arrives. I
guess you can always burn the chairs and the books.

Batteries at utility scale would be a gigantic industry. With
environmental consequences.

Oh yes.
OTOH we have not had days of darkness here (yet?).
And temperatures are not low either,
this summer was / is the warmest ever measured I think?
And if it really gets cold I have one of those mummy like polar sleeping bags.

Compared to those tritium -photo-cell batteries you get a trillion times
more power with a solar panel, if you cannot - or are not allowed to use lipos
or other batteries use supercaps perhaps,
all depends on what you want to do.
For heating you could use a water reservoir you heat up with the sun.

Indeed when things get critical people will start burning anything
and if no food eat horses etc too.
This happened in WW2.
In some shipwreck situations they did eat each other.

Most greenies are hypocrites.

If they get cold feet they will want nuclear power,


And that (nuclear power) is really the way to go.
Thousands of people die in coal mines each year,
1 (one) person died from radiation in F*ckupshima IIRC.
Then it is about the value of property that is more important
than the value of human life,
Greenies are hypocrites.

Wildlife is thriving where Chernobyl was.
Guess what, they removed that video from youtube.
What a puppet show world.
Anthropogenic climate change is big business, just like religion in medieval times
and maybe still is in some countries, a way to maintain power (political power that is)
and to control the masses, sell, never mind the faked science.
Kids love it, demonstrate against climate change, no school!
Tax the weather.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 16/08/2019 09:08, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2019 13:03:29 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in

There is another type of atomic battery, namely the direct collection
of betas in a vacuum. It makes small currents at hundreds of
kilovolts, which can be hard to use efficiently.

I have an 80W solar panel looking at the nuclear processes in the sun.

But only after about a million years of random walk scattering to get to
the surface of the photosphere and escape. The nuclear reactions only
run deep inside the core at high pressures and temperatures.

It leads to an interesting paradox very massive stars burn out extremely
quickly because they can burn fuel in a much greater volume internally.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 16/08/2019 23:36, Rick C wrote:

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 5:24:04 PM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 16/08/2019 21:25, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 16:35:51 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

Nothing to worry about, just earth shadow, sun will be still
there when morning comes Buffer in a battery.

Easy for you to say. A few days worth of batteries for your
house would be a big deal. Especially if a week-long snowstorm
arrives. I guess you can always burn the chairs and the books.

Or in the UK three months grey cloudy skies and the sun barely
getting 15 degrees above the horizon even if the day happens to be
sunny.

UK has active radar "Please go round the dangerous bend" signs
where I live - they work fine in midsummer but are dead in the
water a couple of hours after sunset in winter and destroy a set of
batteries every year. The ones with a wind turbine in addition fare
a bit better.

Batteries at utility scale would be a gigantic industry. With
environmental consequences.

Although the recent UK National grid MFU demonstrates that it might
well make sense to have some battery storage in parallel with wind
farms so that their relatively expensive inverters can be used to
support the grid when the unexpected happens and generators go
offline suddenly.

They still have not released enough information to say what was
wrong. I saw in another group that the frequency drop (the trigger
for most of the load shedding) happened some minutes before the gas
plant went offline and that a couple minutes before the wind farm
went offline. So it is not at all clear what was cause and what was
effect.

That is utter bollocks. The raw frequency data for a few sites have been
published online with timestamps that match that event see for example:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/%22Manchester$20$232%22$20power$20cut/uk.d-i-y/n0CaxawZRR4/-d6gHUIECwAJ

The frequency (and voltage) dip and load shedding was all over inside a
five minute period and then bounced back. 16:52:44 - 16:57:00

The preliminary report is somewhat uninformative with no new info apart
from the possibility that a lightning strike triggered both plants to
disconnect that is being investigated.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/16/national-grid-blackout-report-avoidable-faults-blamed

It has been going on for a while with borderline stability and multiple
near misses where load shedding was almost triggered.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/12/national-grid-experienced-three-blackout-near-misses-last-months/

The Offgem report is likely to say words to the effect of "the National
Grid system load shedding measures worked as intended" and local
distributors dropped 5% of the load. They chose mainly the few remaining
heavy loads on the cheapest load shedding tariffs - these happened to
include some hospitals!! and core railway infrastructure. WTF their
critical signalling system doesn't have backup power is anybody's guess.

National grid restored power again to most places within the hour and
many within fifteen minutes but the power supply interruption had very
long lasting consequences for kit that had assumed a continuous supply.

It beggars belief that they make rolling stock that cannot recover from
a power cut without the intervention of a skilled technician to restart.

I'll wait for the report on what failed before I start talking about
solutions.

It is clear already that the relatively high proportion of renewables at
the time of the first failure during peak evening load meant that there
was much less inertia in the system than with conventional plant. It
also hints that they don't have any spinning reserve at peak load times.

Exactly why the wind farm went offline a minute or so after the gas
plant remains unclear but my instinct is that it was rather too rigid in
its application of the df/dt and delta_f rules. We will eventually find
out after a long investigation and an anodyne whitewash report.

I expect them to bend over in complex contortions to avoid saying that
the UK grid is teetering on the edge of instability (which it is).

--
Regards,
Martin Brown